25 | OutBoise Magazine | NEWS
It was little surprise when HBO’s Looking – a critically acclaimed but poorly rated TV series about
OutBoise.com | Issue 10.1 | August 2015
reduce HIV infection by up to 99 percent when
taken properly.
gay men in San Francisco – introduced an HIVpositive character in season two. After all, the city
The fact that Looking handled PrEP in this man-
was once the epicenter of the AIDS crisis and now
ner may mean the tide has turned on PrEP, a pre-
has one of the nation’s highest rates of HIV-posi-
vention method initially debated – and actually
tive gay and bi men.
lobbied against – by some gay men (notably AIDS
The real revelation, though, was that Eddie, the
character Daniel Franzese (already popular from
his influential role in Mean Girls) plays is poz, proud
and body positive.
People with HIV are rarities on TV (the last series
to have one was Brothers & Sisters in 2011), and
when they exist there’s usually a lot of stigmatizing, handwringing and self-loathing around them,
with singular storylines that play like a “very special
episode.”
But Looking (and the season finale of How to
Get Away with Murder, in which Conrad Ricamora’s character Oliver finds out he has HIV) broke
the mold with an ordinary gay man who just
happened to have HIV. Moreover, it was the first
scripted television series to talk about PrEP, or Truvada, as pre-exposure prophylaxis.
“The brief conversation that we have in the
Halloween episode happens in a way that I’ve
heard PrEP come up amongst my friends… not too
preachy,” Franzese told Plus magazine. “I really
Healthcare Foundation’s Michael Weinstein, who
argued it was a “party drug” that would make users ditch condoms).
Today in many gay communities, on TV or otherwise, we’re increasingly hearing one thing about
PrEP: It’s changing everything.
Both the World Health Organization and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have
begun recommending PrEP to gay and bi men
and transgender women, in hopes of stemming
the tide of the 50,000 new HIV cases each year in
the U.S.
It’s not the numbers, though, that are interesting.
It’s the sociocultural changes we see from PrEP.
The social dynamics among gay men are changing. I’ve talked to dozens of men who are dating
across the viral divide: poz and negative guys dating each other, marrying each other, becoming
what romantics call “magnetic couples.” (The rest
of us call them serodiscordant couples, partnerships in which one is poz and one isn’t.)
like the way that it’s handled.”
Between “treatment as prevention” (a method
So did I. Eddie is sexy, healthy and – this is impor-
in which someone with HIV suppresses the amount
tant – romantically pursued by an HIV-negative
of HIV in their blood, or their viral load, to “unde-
character. So that the pair can have sex without
tectable” levels and thus can no longer transmit
either of them worrying about transmission, the
HIV) and PrEP, many gay men are now having sex
love interest begins a regimen of PrEP, the daily
without the fear that they can transmit, or acquire,
HIV prevention pill that the iPrEx study proved can
HIV, whether or not there are condom ́